French Playwright Quotes

Honoré de Balzac

Molière

Guy de Maupassant

Jean Racine

Pierre Corneille

Alexandre Dumas, fils

Antonin Artaud

You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

These wretched kings,
Of whom all men speak ill, have oft some good in them.

François Andrieux

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

Honoré de Balzac

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

Pierre Beaumarchais

When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.

Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men. ―

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

True, I am young, but for souls nobly born
Valor doesn't await the passing of years.

Pierre Corneille

Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.

Alexandre Dumas, fils

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

Guy de Maupassant

Malicious tongues spread their poison abroad and nothing here below is proof against them.

It is no longer a passion hidden in my heart:
It is Venus herself fastened to her prey.

A kiss! When all is said, what is a kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter i in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; balmy communion with a flavor of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's hearts, and of tasting, on the brink of the lips, each other's soul!

O Richard! O my king!
The universe forsakes thee!

Michel-Jean Sedaine

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Alfred de Vigny

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.

Marquis: Put a duck on a lake in the midst of some swans, and you'll see he'll miss his pond and eventually return to it.
Montrichard: Longing to be back in the mud!

One has to look out for engineers – they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.

Whoever has but a moment to live has nothing more to hide.

Philippe Quinault

What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.

A single nation that has succeeded in lowering the intelligence, the morality, the quality of the human race almost throughout the globe is a phenomenon never before experienced since the beginning of time. I accuse the United States of being in a constant state of crime against humanity.

Henry de Montherlant